Jessie flinched slightly at Aquaria's bellow and its echoed response, even as her tactical instincts made note of the probable location of walls in the dimness. She wasn't at all sure she wanted to meet the kind of pets that a half-Deep One kept in his undersea lair, but she also didn't want Aquaria exposed to them without anybody to protect her if necessary. And it would be stupid to come all this way and stand in what was effectively a garage while her friend went on what was effectively (maybe) a date. Awkward third-wheeling it was, then. "I don't think I've seen the crown," she confirmed politely. "It sounds nice."

"Wait, that was your kid?" Jessie asked, startled by the admission from Aquaria. She knew that Deep Ones didn't have the same sort of family bonds that humans did, but to not even know was weird. Then again, she was hardly in a position to criticize anybody else's weird family relationships. When Aquaria had met Jessie's parents, Jessie had been half-catatonic and hiding in her doppelganger's bedroom closet.
She popped out of the ship as soon as the hatch opened, leaping neatly to land on the dock and taking a really good look around at the place. There was no immediate visible danger, but that hardly meant anything. "Does anyone besides you live here?" she asked.

With one quick glance at Phantom to make sure SFX was covered, Singularity pulled the shield from her back and raised it. She stepped forward, not quite between Aquaria and the other Deep Ones, but easily in range to block any attack before it happened. And then she just waited. She didn't say anything, not that they'd have understood anything she had to say, but her face was the blank cool of a seasoned soldier or a really good bodyguard, unfazed by the threat of violence and ready to become violent herself if needs be. The etched not-quite-star on her shield seemed almost to glow in the dim light.

"Screw you, Dad," Raina spat in her father's direction, grabbing the knife from her mother's hand. "You don't tell me what to do anymore. You think I can't feel what opened that portal? You think I'm as blind as I was when I was fourteen?" She made a noise that was much too bitter to be an actual laugh and shook her head. "I defended you both for a lot longer than I'm proud of, you know. I was... I was just stupid. Anyway, portal now, therapy later."
She brought the knife down with all the force she could bring to bear, stepping quickly out of the way of the resultant mess. No matter how loathe she might have been to get too close to her parents, needs must as the devil drives, so it was she who wrapped her own magic around her father's and shoved it into the portal. Pointing both her outspread palms towards the portal, she began slowly drawing her hands into fists and singing softly. "Haven't you people ever heard of closing a goddamned door? No it's much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality..."

Raina is going to grab the sword from her parents and attempt to put that poor cow out of its misery herself, let me know if anything is going to require a roll there. I'm also going to spend one of the many, many Complication-related HP she deserves for this thread to queue up her array into a form useful for closing magic portals or assisting in closure of same. Merlin is going to bite the proverbial bullet and call for as much superhero backup as he can swing, probably Claremont and the Freedom League emergency line.

Jessie's shoulders twitched under the straps of her new shield, but she did her best not to respond any more than that to Phantom's scrutiny. Phantom wasn't a threat, she reminded herself, Phantom had already signed off on her. It was okay. Really.
"It's not underwater," Jessie assured SFX. It had been her first question too, an important one. She did not like going under the water. "It's like an old oil rig that the Deep Ones have moved into. More defensible than a beach, and not too many people interested in fighting over it anyway, so it's a good place to live."

"All right," Jessie said, still sounding a little dubious but obviously not wanting to disappoint her friend. "Thank you, it's very nice. I don't know if I'll be able to use it very much, but I'll try it." And that was how she came to be standing back in the butterfly garden with the unfamiliar weight of the shield strapped to her back, still wondering in the back of her mind whether she'd have an easier life if she didn't spend quite so much time not disappointing Aquaria. No time to think about that now, though, not when there was work to be done. She just hoped that the weird star sign on the shield was just a decoration and not some kind of monster-summoning spell just biding its time. She nodded a polite greeting to SFX and waited.

Jessie needed no assistance to hop up into the little submarine, though she hesitated for a visible moment before going in. She sometimes had a hard time getting into small, sealed containers like spaceships or submarines, but at least this one wasn't blank sterile white inside. "There was a rock monster," she said simply. "Or an alien who looked like a rock monster. We ended up on opposite sides of a line for a little while, but it was mostly a misunderstanding. Her lips curved as she took her seat, though there was little real amusement in her smile. "Most people out in space think I'm Wander, too. She scares the hell out of them."

"Yikes," Stesha laughed. "Well then, in the interest of saving your clients from unintended punctuation marks, I'll definitely use the phone." She handed him her cell phone, an ArchePhone a few models back from current, sealed inside a weatherproof, impact-resistant case. The wallpaper photo was a little girl with hair the color of earliest spring grass and one missing tooth, which she was displaying with great pride. "Just put yourself in my contacts," she instructed, "and I'll text you mine. I do better with text messages than phone calls," she admitted, "voice calls sometimes just drop out in the barrier between universes, but texts almost always get through eventually."

Jessie was already unhappy about being out on the beach with Aquaria that day. February wasn't exactly prime beach weather in New Jersey, and just because she could survive great extremes of temperature didn't mean she enjoyed them or that they weren't extremely unpleasant. But Aquaria had found a particularly lethal combination of begging and nagging that saw Jessie skipping yet another class to come third-wheel for Aquaria's not-a-date. She zipped up her wetsuit just as the little craft breached the surface of the waves and turned to try and make a good impression.
She stiffened at the first words from Leviathan's mouth, throwing a glance in Aquaria's direction. "No," she replied, forcing her voice to be only a little stiff. "Wander is my sister. I'm Singularity."

Reluctantly, Jessie reached out and took the shield, handling it with the tips of her fingers as though not ready to make the commitment of a whole hand. It was heavy but that didn't matter to someone of her strength, it was more the bulk that was a bit daunting. No slim collapsible baton this! But it was well balanced and solidly made, and the metal gleamed with a soft polish that was sort of appealing under the strange colors. "What does the sign mean?" she asked Aquaria. "I mean, if it's Lemurian, I can't even read what it says."

Jessie's first instinct was to recoil, though it was less from the Lemurian artifacts than from the weapons of war. She had a bat of her own, one Erin had given her when it became clear that Aquaria would keep dragging her out on adventures whether she liked it or not, but these were different. These were no little baton, as innocuous as a can of pepper spray. These were weapons of war, designed for a warrior. If she took them up, it would be an admission that she understood her life was defined by conflict and struggle and causing pain. Erin's words to her in their first battle together already rang in her head whenever Jessie struggled in school or missed another day of classes. All we know how to do is fight.
"They're beautiful," she told Aquaria and meant it, because despite their unsettling designs and dark origin, they really were. "Don't you think you should be using them?"

"I'll get it later," Jessie said with a vague wave, moving to sit as far as possible from the large pile of raw fish. She had her own pile of books: a history textbook and a writing style manual and a glossy book of magazine advertisements. Drawing her feet up under her with a pillow to soften the uncomfortable jut of the tracking anklet, she cracked open the history book. "I'm glad you got to keep some of it," she told Aquaria. "I thought they'd send it all back to museums or something. Nothing dangerous, I guess?"

Singularity flinched very subtly when Phantom cut into their conversation, though she didn't seem to actually find fault with the content. She picked at the black cuff of her uniform sleeve instead, idle habit or nervous habit. Phantom's opening of the portal drew another flinch from her, this one more pronounced as the heroine seemed to try and withdraw her whole body from the vicinity of the portal without actually moving more than a couple of inches. "I think I'll stay here," she told Phantom and the others. "If Aquaria, I mean, if Sea Devil is leaving the dimension, one of us should be here in case her ankle monitor goes off."